Book Recommendation: slide:ology:

Matt Cooper, a friend and coworker, sent this in email last week. I thought I’d share the recommendation with a few of my closest friends. ;O)

I’ve been hallway-evangelizing a book I read recently, and a few people asked me to share the title.  It’s called slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte.  It walks through constructing useful and desirable presentations from both a theoretical and a practical point of view.  While their focus is on “grand scale” presentations (think “An Inconvenient Truth”), there are micro-lessons that we can easily bring back to the constant barrage of Microsoft PowerPoint slides we’re called upon to deliver.

In my reading I noted a ton of similarities to scenario-focused engineering.  You focus on the end goal, not the specific implementation, until you have a crystal clear idea of what you want to deliver.  Then, you use a set of best practices and tools to implement that message in an engaging and sometimes beautiful manner.